skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How might one transition from commercial software into research?
The first company I worked at during the "dot-com" era, back when we were all worried about Y2K, lol, used genetic algorithms to solve mobile resource management problems - hence I developed an interest in "deep-search" problems, those problems whose solution space is too large to be solved precisely but solutions can be approximated via heuristics. I still have this interest, but have sort of found myself dealing with logistics types of solutions, i.e., working with solutions that "talk to" SAP supply chain solutions, fine, but does not sort of have the theoretical aspect which I have an interest in.<p>I am proficient with C and Java mostly along with UNIX commands and some auxiliary skills, but really have more interest in cool problems to be solved rather than the latest/greatest web fads like Ruby and so on. My question would be, how does one, having "cut one's teeth" so to speak in commercial software, sort of "transition" to more research. I also have a bit of a side-interest in AI as I have some experience with back-propagation neural networks written in C as a solution to predict energy markets. I think my biggest interest is sort of "big problems" that require heuristics to solve them but since while I think I have a pretty solid resume in terms of work experience, both in the area of mobile research optimization and in logistics, I don't have the academic "cred" (e.g. B.S. degree) to sort of "back that up" so to speak.<p>Most recently I have come across the concept of functional programming, of mathematical interest to me, so my current idea is to study a bit more about that. I just wondered if anyone in the HN community had any thoughts in terms of how to "transition" from a rather sucessful career in the commercial/enterprise software world towards more getting into the research/theory end of things, without perhaps the letters after my name to back that up, lol. Any thoughts appreciated! :-)
It loses your email address if you don't enter your password :(
If you can look at a word of memory and differentiate pointers from values, garbage collection can become extremely simple. It's a shame that tagged architectures have largely died out.

As an experiment, I tried writing a garbage collector which used high-order bits of a word to identify pointers. The result is about a page of code in Forth:

http://hastebin.com/raw/gabunowelo.fs

This example works exclusively with fixed-size "cons pair" allocations, but generalizing to arbitrary-sized allocations only increases the complexity of the system slightly. Obviously this bitflag technique is not "safe" in general, as arbitrary values on the stacks could produce false positives, but it's easy to imagine a 33-bit or 65-bit architecture that provided the necessary hardware support without such caveats.
I think the first four words here make a huge difference:

> I was convinced that he just wanted to keep getting scoops.
Yes. When writing LaTeX, I put line breaks in after phrases and clauses, as well as at every sentence end. I'm following exactly Kernighan's advice from old nroff documentation.

As a result, my text is very ragged right. I don't even notice it because I'm concentrating on meaning, not form.
> instead of bluish

But if it wasn't blue, it wouldn't suppress your melatonin secretion and make you stay up all night reading and buy more books!
Technical Co-Founder Confessions
i see alex is this busy. no wonder alex hasn't been online in steam recently
Good read. I wrote a similar Flask introductory article[0] on how I moved my Wordpress site/blog over to Flask. The source code of my site can be viewed on github[1].

[0]: http://vertstudios.com/blog/new-flask-site/
[1]: https://github.com/joequery/Vert-Flask
For SVN exiles, there-s git-svn http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-svn.html
The testing rules I code by:

- will someone else be touching the code? If yes then I TDD

- Am I likely to be touching the code six months from now? If yes then I at least document with tests.

- Is it a crucial piece of code who's specs I want documented? If yes then I document with tests.
I don't disagree with the philosophy here, but the examples given are deeply flawed.

Ben Silbermann kept working on Pinterest because he didn't want to admit to failing. His parents are both specialist doctors who could certainly afford to pass him $50k/year to make sure he was "okay". There was no desperation, just the fact that he kept perpetuating the lie that everything was okay with his business, thus by telling this lie, quitting would make him feel like a dishonest person (I have told the same lie as well. Thank god it worked out.).

The AirBnB founders sold cereal because they are hustlers, not because they were desperate. I'd be willing to be it was more of a drunken idea backed by "fuck it, let's do it", more than desperation.

If there is startup lesson to be learned from these two examples, it is that never giving up, and "fuck it, why not" are beneficial. Desperation may be helpful, but I think the author needs to find better examples.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1877926324/plenty-a-groc...

It's not the only one...

Kickstarter's new policy is about them not wanting to act as an online store, not about taking away the "fund my new convenience store" vs creative projects. Its more about them not wanting to be used by anyone (creative projects included) as if they are there to basically be a selling platform. At least thats how I viewed it.
Report Describes How Armstrong and His Team Eluded Doping Tests
This is why, by default on 32-bit architectures, fixnums in GNU Emacs are 30 bits:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/106597/why-are-fixnums-in...

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Int...

SBCL has a more elaborate tag bit system:

http://sbcl-internals.cliki.net/tag%20bit
Hey, you may be interested to know that in the upcoming ARM v8's AArch64 mode, the upper 8 bits of all pointers can be used freely for tagged pointers.

See page 11 of: http://board.flatassembler.net/download.php?id=5698
Speak-for-Yourself patent lawsuit settled
A diamond larger than earth?
And I'm the exact opposite. I love exercises. You should find what works for you and stick with it until it doesn't work for you! For a while, I would read a section out of a programming book, think to myself "Could I explain this better?", and if I could, I'd write an article. If I came across an exercise in a book, I'd think to myself "What if these requirements had to be met? What if this needs to be read in from a keyboard? A database?", and I'd expand the exercise into a full fledged project. Just do your best to keep yourself interested. Find a reason to stay excited.
I really like how Plan 9 solved communication through sockets and files (which is how the OS doesn't care if any part of the system is remote or local). Just sayin, it has been done pretty elegantly.
I would personally pay $15-$20 if need be. And A/B testing on the prices won't be fair to the B category. Don't you think :)
But only when one has already access, doesn't it? When one hits a paywall without access and clicks the bookmarklet it would only show the login page in instapaper.
This is the same in New Zealand. ASBBank lets you send money to your Facebook friends from their mobile app.
You don't know what you're doing (and that's okay)
I love this idea and fully agree with it. My friends are currently planning a vacation for a large group of us, which involves flights, hotels, and events, as well as coming up with options for a range of budgets, interests, and family needs like child care. Online vacation agencies would be a huge help and well worth paying IMHO.
The general criticism of Wolfram's book is that it's heavy on pictures and self-praise and comparatively light on content. It's certainly very pretty, and has some interesting results (e.g. that Rule 110 is Turing-complete) but a lot of the work is summary or rehash of other extant (and often non-cited) material. There are often more thorough, more concise, and more lucid resources on cellular automata from other research; I'd cite Zuse's Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space) off the top of my head for a work that comes to many of Wolfram's conclusions several decades prior to Wolfram.

In fact, a good strategy for becoming familiar with cellular automata as a field is to read reviews of ANKOS by people with degrees[1], collect the works and authors mentioned, and trawl them. You'll learn a lot about a lot that way.

[1]: http://shell.cas.usf.edu/~wclark/ANKOS_reviews.html has an extensive selection of such reviews.

EDIT: It's also worthy of note here that Wolfram would reject the original post's model as not worthwhile, as ANKOS explicitly argues that we should reject continuous models in favor of discrete models; indeed, that is the very definition of his "new kind of science."
I think ksherlock is wrong. Marco explained somewhere that he doesn't store for a url the content only once (like the url serves as a hash), but stores the content of a page for every account uniquely (his database is somewhat 200 GB). I also did find this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2336332

> Instapaper honors access. If you have access to that Article it will save it, if not then you won't get it.
Simple script to watch and build your coffeescript files.
a) we were not developing for just for iOS. Our service is not an iOS only App. Our iOS App is just a tiny part of the whole package.

b) We knew App Store was the only channel, we also knew paid apps have to pay 30%. We, like many other people here, just were not aware that cloud storage apps were required to pay a 30% fee too.
"I'm here to patent infinitesimal calculus for solutions to physics problems."
If there is startup lesson to be learned from these two examples, it is that never giving up, and "fuck it, why not" are beneficial.

Well put. In terms of never giving up, I think its necessary to explain that it does not mean sticking to one idea per se. But to the goal of growing one succesful business (whatever it may end up being). One can iterate over many ideas, failure after failure, and not need to give up in the grand scheme of things. Sure, it is a bit demoralizing, but some of us manage to get back on the horse and keep going.

The fuck it let's do it attitude is very important. Nothing happens until you make it happen. Nobody is going to serve you your startup on a silver platter. Nobody.

Desperation may be helpful, but I think the author needs to find better examples.

Desperation is helpful, but in my experience it is not a good driving force. It clouds judgement and is usually aimed at short term success.
Hacking Buffalo Cheese
Apple, Bing Maps Reveal Secret Sites
Foursquare Considered Selling, Is The Best Local Search Tool In The Planet
Oh, THOSE garbage collectors. I was rather hoping this would be an exposé on the secret tech employed by curbside trash collection companies.
What are the barriers? This also might help you to think throught.

> Growth/Learning: If you had N+1 (degrees, title, experience) what would you be doing different at this company? Would advancement hurt the team dynamic or is it just the inertia of the system (no excuse to promote). What if your team added +1 people, would that have any effect on you/your prospects? Good/bad/indifferent

>Pay. This is also worth thinking about. What are the barriers to market pay? Do they have some-reason (stong brand, etc) or is it tactical (cash management)? Why so stingy with option/ect? How old the company is and what its brand/risk profile are are worth considering (when doing the grass is greener, both sides compare). Did you get a raw deal (because you got hired at a low rate with x% raise) or is everybody on the same bare-bones diet?

The more difficult case is when there is a team they just want to stay the same. everyone is paid the same. and everyone else but you is happy. If its a heterodox mix of pay, its easier to at least "true-up" to market. If its a heterodox mix of experience, consider saturday night live -- at some stage almost everyone moves on -- but the younger folks get a lot of exposure and skill, until they too have their fill.

Most managers won't rock the boat unless its a mission critical situation. But if you have a plan, it helps: why it makes sense you should get N+1 more $ and how PQR will make XYZ more productive and any gap ABC will be filled by LMNO...etc...no brain damage or political/ capital/blood being spilled: That helps them a lot.
Well the reason I asked in the first place is to decide weather i should apply to this company or not. I am a good developer but if they have unrealistic expectations I might waste my time with the interview.
I think a really cool tactic is racket's places, which basically creates individual zones running their own module with their own gc (but objects shared between cores don't take up extra space, there is a global table or something).
I mostly use Flask to create handy status dashboards and debugging tools for servers that do other things. It's a nice use pattern: you want to expose some of the internals of a server over a firewalled-off port, so you whip up a few HTTP endpoints in Flask, start an HTTP server in a background thread, and declare victory. It's quick and easy, and can save huge amounts of time later when you're trying to figure out why something isn't quite working.

There are other reasons to avoid GAE -- price, datastore latency, lack of flexibility -- but my main one is that GAE just doesn't apply to most of the things I use Flask for.
> What we can guarantee is that if you are dealing with someone on our platform, they have never misbehaved before.

It will be interesting to see how you manage that!

A few things I find sorely lacking with Alibaba and China in general, some of which I'm sure you have in your crosshairs, others not so sure:

1. Language - Obviously English isn't their first language so some complications are to be expected, but:

a. I think there has got to be some serious disconnect going on between people with relatively proficient English speaking and writing skills, and companies that need that skill. I've been in contact with some rather large companies ($25+ million in sales or much more) whose sales people are just helpless.

b. Product Descriptions - sometimes just bad spelling/grammar or honest mistakes, but other times they're just plain wrong - like, differentiating details that are really important are ambiguous, or worse. Perhaps this is deliberate to a degree (which I would also like to see go away)

2. Culture - There's stretching the truth, and then there's lying, and it seems where this line is drawn varies greatly between cultures. It's very frustrating when you're trying to source a product, and every person you contact has it, in fact they have everything. Except they don't. Maybe there's something you could do along the lines of a comprehensive catalog of products, so when they list something, they "have" to tie it to a "fairly" strict item number(s), so I don't have to rely on text searches (which go against dishonest product descriptions). And, if they are doing a deal on 2 items and the buyer needs a 3rd, maybe you could somehow offer collaboration capabilities between sellers, ideally ones that they'd actually want to use (share the profit on a sale perhaps?)

3. Product listings - I'm sure you know all the issues here, but the ones that most bother me are the atrociously low-res pictures, pictures from other unrelated products the seller has listed showing when clicking "next", terrible ambiguous/misleading descriptions, etc.

4. Quality control - With modern technology, why some sellers don't do what your platform offers on their own (provide hi-quality photos, etc) is an absolute mystery to me, so it will be nice if you can show them how to do this, and affordably for them so it doesn't cut into their margins. However, for a lot of sellers, the total lack of quality control is a tremendous benefit to them so they can bait & switch, ship different product than ordered, etc.

5. Affordable Escrow service - as others have mentioned, a lot of sellers like to move transactions off the system. I hope you guys can resist the urge to take too much of a cut of the action and find some affordable way to provide security for the buyer and not cut into profits for the seller.

It's good to see some competition for Alibaba that's for sure, I really hope you guys can pull this off. I wish you the best of luck!
The parking-via-phone app solution has existed for almost a year: http://paybyphone.com/sf/

Graffiti removal is pretty damn easy via 311: http://www.sf311.org/index.aspx?page=118

And real time tracking of public transit could be better, but it's already pretty good: http://routesy.com/
The attention and revenues they would generate from having bigger and more successful products (revenue size wise) would benefit the smaller creative projects IMHO.
Yes, the interactive debugger in Werkzeug[1] is fantastic! I couldn't tell you how many times I've deliberately put "asdf.asdf" in a method to deliberately throw an exception so that I can play around inside the debugger.

One more Flask thing: Flask-Login[2] is a popular way of managing sessions.

1. Werkzeug is the WSGI utility library upon which Flask is built. If you do enough stuff in Flask, you'll probably end up learning something about it, which is okay, because the documentation — like Flask's — is excellent.

2. http://packages.python.org/Flask-Login/
US Stock Market: Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week
Hulu Struggles To Survive The Influence Of Its Parent Companies
Highly anecdotal, but desperation helped me succeed. I left law school and cut ties with my previous path. To go back to it would have been humiliating, and dispiriting, because I didn't want to do it.

So it was succeed, or go back to something that I didn't want to do.

That drove me onwards for a good nine months. I wrote a book which freed up time to focus on long term projects rather than short term cashflow.

Looking back, it's the most boring thing I've ever done. I constantly thank my past self for letting me live a more relaxed life now, doing things I want to do.

I don't think I could have done it without my poor alternate options. But purposefully forcing yourself into desperate circumstances is risky.
This sounds very much like how Erlang does it - each process gets an isolated garbage collected heap and communication between processes happens through message passing.

How lightweight are Racket places? I'm not very familiar with the language, so I don't know if they're really comparable to Erlang processes.
Have you googled "conway's game of life" recently?
You and Linus are working off different definitions of "solved". Sure they did it, he never said it can't be done.

But does it run efficiently and quickly?
I don't see how they do. Of course he was convinced, otherwise he wouldn't be making that statement in the first place. My question was why he thought that.
Canonical Work to Improve Gaming on Ubuntu
"... I wonder... is there a correlation between being desperate and great success? ..."

No. Desperation implies stress and stress inhibits good decision making.

"When business and life is anything
but usual, we do not rise to the
occasion. We sink to the level of
our preparation." Adam O’Donnell [0]

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv_rHrVQTh4&feature=youtu...
agreed. i sympathise with mongohq's position as a proprietary SAAS provider, but if they can find a way to push any of this back, they should. tools matter.
I couldn't find any tests for the server. Was this really created without them? Interesting...
Help a hacker out
Google has made creating maps extremely cheap using cars. I would estimate that US has 60K-80K miles of road. Even driving at 25mph two cars can cover entire US in just one year. With 2 people to maintain car, collecting this data would cost less than $400K. Extending to this to 30 countries would cost less than $5 million. It's really tiny cost and this is considering worse case.
Giving someone a month of notice (or zero notice and a month of severance pay) isn't harsh. As far as the other obligations go, I believe the law also states that you can have a contract which explicitly overrides these severance obligations.

The obligation to have Chilean citizens (or permanent residents?) involved in most kinds of incorporated LLCs (I think particularly for single-founder companies) is much more of a big deal, but even it is not really that big a deal if you hire a lawyer and have them do it. It just means it costs more than starting a company in the US.
Car Electronics
trying to get out of the fusion into a Focus ST. The Fusion's great, especially in the winter, I just miss the manual transmission hot-hatch world. If you know someone looking, please forward this around.
MySQL vs PostgresSQL
Rephrase: can hunger drive success? yes.

Now, compare the use of words.
The issue isn't adding extra data to pointers; it's distinguishing a pointer from an integer of the same size. The extra bit needs to be "meta".

Some x64 targeted languages already use tagged pointers without specific hardware support; e.g. I recall reading about JVM using several bits of object pointers in 64-bit to encode a class index, so that polymorphic inline caches can be checked without an indirection.
only in job interviews, in blog posts, when commenting in HN or answering stackoverflow questions, and only when I have a budget to do so. In other cases, I just try to write self debugging code (assert things, think of edge cases, good logging, never take anything for granted). e.g. I test the code within the code. instead of writing an external test, my test code is within the code, not sure if it makes sense, but that's how I get to do things both fast, and keep quality.

HOWEVER, if I have unit tests available, this is priceless, so if I can have the budget and time to write them, I would, but if writing tests would mean you avoid writing code, just write code (unless you work for SpaceX or NASA)

And to your point, if it's an MVP? I would say ditch the tests at first, it's better to test your idea and market, than test code that might be thrown away. and you should plan to throw away your MVP. you won't be able to live with yourself if you don't. just call it garbage code, and if you get traction, just rewrite the whole thing. it might be a lie your are telling yourself, but if you over engineer your startup, you might end up not knowing if it's true or not.
Sure - check out http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1434

What you're interested in is:

"signature" - "A signature value that authorizes the form and proves that only you could have created it. This value is calculated by signing the Base64-encoded policy document with your AWS Secret Key, a process that I will demonstrate below."
The price of diamonds has only gone up ever since they've "lost" their monopoly in the year 2000.
Flask is so damn awesome! For all those other projects Django seems too big, I use Flask. The hardest thing for me was finding a project structure that worked for me. I still haven't landed one that was "perfect". What project structure/skeletons for Flask apps work for you?
Absolutely true. It's his decision which platforms he releases on. It just seems like such a waste of potential audience - iPhone isn't dominant any more, there are at least as many people on Android (especially us hackers) - and it does suck being on the Android side and not having access to this. But it's totally his decision.
I'm not sure if this is as cool as it looks. I guess it's yet to be seen what the larger-scale behavior might be, but it looks like it's just a lot of the same gliders, orbits, and strands between them.
I mistakenly left off a key part-- it needs to manufactured with those goals in mind. Thank you, though. I'll certainly consider this if a viable alternative never arrives, but I'm downgrading from an awful Alcatel Android device to a "dumbphone" (and dropping my data plan) next week.